Exuberant vegetables

It's totally amazing how productive the tomatoes and other vegetables are in beds filled with fresh compost.  I'm continually reminded however, that, if I added more nutrients and watered more, I'd have a REALLY productive garden.

But I can barely keep up with roasting and freezing the tomatoes that I have (the ones that we can't eat fresh); in fact, I have marinara sauce simmering right now to freeze for winter.  They're not the 'tastiest' tomatoes, necessarily, some being harvested early to avoid squirrel herbivory, but I hate to waste them.

Here's an image of the front raised beds.  You can't see any ripening tomatoes, but they're there, in any case, and the leeks are getting quite large enough to harvest.

Slow-roasted tomatoes

My favorite way to preserve tomatoes is to slow-roast them (at 200°F for ~ 8-10 hours), and then freeze them.  It's not original with me at all;  not being inclined to canning, a way to have tomatoes for delicious sauce for pasta or whatever without messing with hot water and jars is appealing.

I bumbled on to Kalyn's method in a Google search a couple of years ago, and have been delighted with the results.

Heirloom tomatoes and white peaches

I was listening to the songs of crickets tonight; summer is here in the mountains of North Carolina.  They were delayed compared to the Piedmont, not surprisingly, but are singing loudly now.

I've been harvesting lots of tomatoes since I returned home (to the mountains) and have been trying to shore up the vines (the lightweight tomato cages available at the big box stores simply can't support the weight of Cherokee Purple and Summer Feast tomatoes without extra support).  I thought I'd taken a picture of the raised bed vegetable garden since returning, but apparently not!

I slow-roasted a batch of sliced Cherokee Purples overnight, and stuck them in the freezer.  They'll be summer magic in the winter, for sure.  And there are lots of green Summer Feast tomatoes that were casualties of the tipped-over cages.  I'll need to see if they ripen well, or not -- they're quite big, in any case.

I succumbed to buying a basket of white peaches at the Western North Carolina Farmer's market yesterday.  White peaches are wonderful, but, hmm, this is a lot of them.

But, the cost was remarkably low, and I'm planning to slow roast some of them for the freezer, make a peach salad for a potluck party on Saturday, and we'll eat lots of them fresh, and maybe I'll dry some of them as halves?

I was going to make a peach tart, too, but then realized that I don't have a pie or tart pan here;  it could be rectangular, however, or a 'rustic' tart on a baking pan.